Several months later, on a busy street, people begin to pour out of
several theaters and find their way to their conveyances home. "An
atmosphere of pleasure and prosperity seemed to hang over the
throng, born, perhaps, of good clothes and of having just emerged
from a place of forgetfulness." In the midst of this throng of
people, a handful of "wet wanderers" hang around looking
dejected. "A girl of the painted cohorts of the city" wanders around
as well. She smiles at men she passes, but she usually chooses the
men who are from the country or are poor-looking. She hurries
through the crowd as if she’s looking for her home.

She moves along the streets until she gets to the saloon district.
She passes the door of a concert hall and hears the boisterous
sounds from within it. She sees a tall young man in evening dress
standing around looking bored. He is surprised that the girl passes
him without taking notice of him. She continues to walk on. She
passes a pompous man with "philanthropic whiskers" whose broad
back seems to sneer at her. She passes a man in business clothes
who seems to be rushing to make an appointment. He runs into her
on accident and apologizes hastily.

The girl passes out of the restaurant-saloon district into the darker
streets. A young man notices her looking at him. He wonders if she
thought he was a farmer. A worker replies to her saying it’s a fine
evening. She smiles in the face of a hurrying boy who smiles back
at her with "cheery unconcern," saying he can’t be with her this
evening, but will perhaps do so on another. She comes across a
drunken man who yells at her that he has no money.

She passes into the "gloomy districts near the river" which are the
residence of black factories. She only occasionally passes saloons.
She comes across a man who tells her he already has a date. She
passes on until she meets a ragged man who asks her if she thinks
he’s a millionaire. Finally, she passes into the "final block" and
approaches the river. She sees a huge man in torn and greasy
clothes. He laughs at her and then follows her into "the crimson
regions." As they walk along, the river "appeared a deathly black
hue."

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Notes

The unnamed girl of this chapter is obviously Maggie. Crane
doesn’t name her as a method of suggesting that the reader
shouldn’t view her as an individual case of a girl who went on the
wrong path, but a type who represents many such girls who
inevitably end up prostituting themselves for lack of other
livelihood.

Crane structures the chapter on a journey motif. Maggie moves
down the class scale from the theater district to the dock yards. She
seems to be most inept at her new profession of prostitution. She
chooses only those men who seem too poor to pay her. She never
even approaches the men in expensive suits, but hurries past them.
The one man standing in evening clothes outside a hall would have
been a likely candidate for Maggie, but she passes him by as if he
weren’t there. Perhaps Crane is suggesting that since Maggie has
been raised in the strictly segregated class world of her society, she
sees men of other classes as almost invisible. She never imagines
that she could come into contact with them and profit from them.

The images of prostitution here are obviously images of death.
Crane sees Maggie’s new job as one that inevitably will lead to her
death. Her walk from the lighted streets of the theater district to the
dark, unlit streets of the docks symbolizes her walk from life to
death. Crane cannot seem to imagine how a woman could possibly
survive having to use her body for making an income. In this, he
ignores the vast number of women who were sex workers for years
and years of their lives. He is a nineteenth-century thinker in this
aspect as in others.